


Chances

by TheFierceBeast



Category: Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll, Dracula - Bram Stoker, The War of the Worlds - H. G. Wells
Genre: Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Disasters, Gen, Multiple Crossovers, Victorian, Victorian Science Fiction, Yuletide 2014, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 06:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2802800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFierceBeast/pseuds/TheFierceBeast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Original prompt: <br/>The only characters I nominated are the Narrator and the Martians, but feel free to write about any of the others if you like. I'd love to read anything at all! The only thing I'll beg for is this: please don't "fix" the science with modern knowledge. Old sci-fi is so fascinating to me because yes they're some great stories but also because they're so firmly of their time, they're like glorious little time capsules of every stage of recent scientific discovery and imagination. I'd love to see something in keeping with Wells' era of more limited knowledge but limitless possibility.</p>
<p>Also - so much potential for amazing crossovers! How do Mina and Jonathan/Sherlock and Watson/grown up Alice or Jim Hawkins/Oscar Wilde(?!) fare with the Martians? If you want to write a crossover/fusion type thing I would be all over that. I'm familiar with a lot of Victorian literature, and plenty of modern stuff set around the same time, but even if I don't know your other fandom I'd still be interested in a crossover if there's something you want to write - I get sci-fi disaster fic AND a new fandom, double win :D</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chances

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



**MINA HARKER’S JOURNAL, Tuesday 11 June 1901**

 

It seems to me strange now to once again be writing this journal that I long abandoned to the uncomplicated peaceful pleasure of motherhood and family. How strange too that foul events so quickly become as mere dreams in the bright dawn of reliable normality which dispels horrid nightmares more rapidly even than the illuminating torch of modern science. Science, I am told, will explain every thing eventually; but for now it struggles to catch up.

We are to be at war once again.

The news reached us only two days ago, with the evening headlines declaring _REPULSE OF THE MARTIANS! LONDON IN DANGER!_ Had it come at any other time then even we, I am certain, would have scoffed at it for scaremongering, but last summer’s visit to Transylvania and the memories it resurfaced were too vivid.  When he saw the newspapers, Jonathan’s face paled and he got about him that old frantic way of when we were first wed. “Quincey,” he said, “we must get him to safety.”

“My darling,” said I, “there is no reason to panic.” I wish I had felt as certain as I sounded, but I was in truth alarmed at his reaction to what I felt sure was nothing more than media frenzy. “Woking is far enough from the city.”

But he turned on me haunted eyes, and he said, “It is happening again.”

 

We sent a message on foot to Arthur, who we knew to be at his townhouse, and the contents of the note which Jonathan penned were sufficient that, by eight o’ clock, a carriage arrived at our door. In a matter of moments, seemingly, our dear friends had our son away from the capital - gone from Chalk Farm, north to Whitby. They told us upon leaving that there were extra trains being put on that night - a fact that should have alerted us to the grave nature of the threat, although we were relieved enough to have Quincey safe. It didn’t occur to either of us that we would go too; some kind of unspoken pact sealed it. For it feels that, having our lives touched once by such strangeness, that we are now unable to run from it when it again strikes; if we should, by experience, have any greater knowledge or useful part to play in the defence of our great nation - nay, our species - then it is our duty to remain and stand firm.

 Early yesterday morning Jonathan decided that we would go to the railway station to see if there was any more recent news come in the night. I had slept badly, having been kept awake - so I thought - by what sounded like cannon fire, although I could not be completely sure I had not dreamt it and was fatigued merely by nightmares. We hailed a cab and got as far as the Tottenham Court road when crowds forced us to halt. The driver was ready to turn the horses about and look for an alternative way, but Jonathan stopped him and we alighted. It was all that we could do not to be swallowed up in the crush of people heading towards, we quickly ascertained, St Pancras. All manner of people - from factory workers to fashionable ladies - were pressing forward with a collective sort of urgency, such as I am sure that not all of them were even certain what they were running from, but were rather caught up in the anxiety of the crowd. For it was not quite terror yet, more an unspoken but palpable dread that suffused and threatened to break the surface. Jonathan grabbed the arm of one fellow who looked to be a clerk or similar and said, “I beg your pardon, what is the rush? What news?”

The man merely regarded him with flashing wild eyes and said, “The Martians are coming!” At those words, a woman close by screamed and a small scuffle broke out, of people trying to push forward more quickly through the masses, and I think that one woman went down amidst the crowd not to appear again, although the flow of bodies forced us rapidly and insistently too far away from that location to see or offer help and it was all that I could do to hold onto my husband. Fortunately, I have never been the fainting type. _The Martians are coming_. How often I have heard that phrase since. It hissed on in the background like the babbling of a stream threatening to break its banks, as we attempted to get to St Pancras to see if there was any more useful information, but at length gave up and turned back, seeking a circuitous route away from the main roads (the lesser streets also filling quickly up as the day wore on.) Upon one of the roads we encountered a newspaper boy wheeling an empty cart, who informed us that Weybridge and Shepperton were smoking ruins and that the military was defeated at Richmond by some form of poisonous gas from what he called ‘great, blasted metal war machines’. Whole families streamed from basements like rats leaving a ship. Some carried bundles of, we assumed, valuables. Some carried only children and I thanked God in my heart that we had already managed to send Quincey away. We managed finally to secure another cab to take us back home, by which time we had already walked the majority. Calling in at the Post Office we found the Postmaster alone and were told that telegrams were not being sent, a matter that vexed Jonathan greatly as he was desperate by that time to make contact with Professor Van Helsing, who he was certain would have a better idea of things. I must admit that the cessation of mail worries me very much. Just think of it! That the whole structure of our civilised society should crumble in a day, with rioting on the streets and no trains or telegrams!

When we arrived home we found the door unlocked and that Tilly had deserted her post. We determined what to do. “We stay put,” said Jonathan, and I was inclined to agree. An eerie quiet - I cannot call it a calm - was over the house. Without Quincey’s laughter, or Tilly busying herself from room to room, the place was silent. We - mercifully we thought - heard no more gunshots. No carriages in the street outside. Peering from the windows, everywhere looked more deserted than usual, but those few people going about their business appeared quite normal and there was no sign of great mechanical war machines upon the horizon. At first it was the waiting that was terrible on the nerves, the certainty that something awful should happen at any moment, and the bracing for that axe to fall; the quiet seemed more appalling at that time than any clamorous sounds of escape. Then as night fell again, it seemed almost as if we _could_ merely wait it out, that this time the dreadfulness would simply pass us by.

We both found difficulty sleeping again; retiring for safety to the same room and fearful to open the windows in case of poisonous gases, the night was stifling hot and not conducive to rest. It was around two when I was finally about to succumb to fatigue when a great hammering sounded and made us both start in alarm, before we realised that it was somebody pounding upon the front door.

Jonathan threw on his coat (for we were both fully dressed; prepared for flight) and went to see what the noise was about, I close behind him. I expected the military, or perhaps a policeman calling for residents to evacuate, but the door opened upon a woman who said, “Let me in, pray,” without any preamble whatsoever.

“Of course, Miss,” said Jonathan and stood back and bade her enter, which she did, looking around her and back out onto the darkening street. Following her eyes I saw it unsurprisingly deserted and black, yet made out dimly from the light that spilled from our doorway one single child’s shoe resting in the middle of the road. Something about that lonely image made me know unquestionably that we must leave immediately and I went to say so but the woman spoke my heart before me.

“We must leave immediately,” said she.

I took a moment to look at her. She was not young, older than I and a little older than Jonathan, of middle years I judged, with a mass of greying fair hair worn loose, but good, tidy clothes - as if she had been interrupted in dressing, perhaps. Jonathan said, “But it is the middle of the night. We will not get far now. Better to wait till morning, at least.” Then, offering his hand, “Mr Harker, and my wife, Mrs Harker.”

The woman looked at him and gave a queer little smile. “How curious it is that even when nothing is as it should be, we still insist on formality. I wonder did the Martians shake one another’s appendages before they came to murder us?” She did not shake his hand and I felt at once cross with her and almost thrilled. “Alice,” she said, by way of introduction.

“Mina,” I replied and she turned from Jonathan to me, not smiling but intent. “And my husband is Jonathan.” Wise darling man, he said nothing in complaint. “What news have you?”

She leaned her head to one side - a quizzical gesture that I have noticed frequently from her during our so far brief acquaintance. “They came from the sky. They landed all of six days ago-”

“Six!” Jonathan interjected, I think unable to help himself, horror in his cry.

“Thus far nothing has stopped them; they trample all over us like ants, and suck us up like an anteater sucks up so many ants, too.” I thought it an odd thing to say, but I nodded to her to go on; she was evidently knowledgeable and brave too, for only one who had been at the heart of the crisis, it seems, could know so much (indeed, she was later to tell us that she had been at home at Kingston, receiving frequent news from the boatmen, until the Martians came to that place and the lucky fled.) Alice went on, “They have burnt all in their way with some form of hot blast that cannot be seen but ignites everything in its path, from houses to cows, and at such a range! I saw the very Thames boil with it.” I felt my husband shudder with revulsion and placed a hand upon his arm. “They also have a queer kind of black smoke which they bellow out, which is quite poisonous to everything that breathes it.”

“The poison gas,” Jonathan said and I nodded. “It’s black, you say? That’s visible, that’s something. These machines of theirs, are they really so very huge as you say?”

“Oh yes. Quite prodigious big.” She said it so matter-of-factly that I could hardly even be frightened and I felt myself suddenly warming very much to her.

“And made of metal. Mechanical behemoths.” Jonathan said. “Stakes will be no good against them, nor knives either. If the army has already failed…” His words hung in the air. I know him to be a brave man, but we are none of us miracle workers.

But Alice stuck out her chin and said, “There is always a way. You just have to look at things topsy-turvy sometimes.”

“Topsy-turvy,” Jonathan repeated quietly, as if the words themselves held some key to understanding.

She nodded. “An elephant is afraid of a mouse, you know. Sometimes the smallest thing can defeat the tallest, the most ordinary confound the most extraordinary, if you only figure out how.”

“You are right, Mrs… Miss… Alice. I do believe that you are quite right.” Jonathan took my hand, and squeezed it gently.

“So now,” I said, “we just need to figure out how.”

 

At first light we set forth across country in search of the Professor. I shall not even be able to bring with me my travel typewriter, but have a journal and pencil only. I will endeavour to keep track of events as best I am able. Once before, just eight short years ago, we faced evil: now the whole country, perhaps the whole human race, faces it with us. Once before, a handful of us faced one devil incarnate and through bravery, love and faith defeated him. This time, all of us together shall defeat the many. As God is my witness, evil shall never prevail.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Yuletider, I hope that you enjoy this and that it sticks to your request closely enough - I tried to fit more things in, but it just refused to play ball. I chose those fandoms basing it on the premise that the Martians invade in 1901, so Alice would be 42 and it would be 8 years after the main events and one year after the epilogue of Dracula. Have an awesome Yuletide! :)


End file.
